What can be done to stop email spam, email viruses and Ransomware

Unfortunately FREE email accounts such as Outlook.com/Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud etc. do not offer a great deal of protection from SPAM emails, phishing emails, emails containing viruses and Ransomware.

Paid or ISP provided email accounts offer better protection. Microsoft Hosted Exchange is an industry leader in providing secure email accounts that provide a level of spam detection. Some ISP’s such as Telstra and iiNet also offer paid add-on services that claim to offer spam and virus protection but not at the same level.

In the past users have relied on 3rd party Anti-Virus programs to protect them from computer viruses which were being delivered as a malicious program/attachment to an email. And a whole industry of anti-virus software providers has blossomed.

Unfortunately, todays threats are mostly from emails trying to send users to fake websites where there is an attempt to capture your login details, password, credit-card, banking details or identity information such as DOB, Passport number, Drivers licence number and postal address. This is known as Phishing

Todays Computers and iPads may be protected from Computer Viruses but it’s Phishing you really need to worry about.

No matter how up-to-date your virus protection or operating system (OS) is, it is normally human-error that gives scammers the information they need to empty your bank accounts and steal your personal information.

Phishing in Apple Mail

Phishing in Google Mail (Gmail.com)

If you have a gmail account you can report phishing emails by, Opening the message in Gmail, Next to Reply – click the Down arrow, then click Report phishing.

Avast/AVG, Trend, Symantec, Mcafee, Microsoft etc all offer program or services that attempt to remove malicious links and malware from incoming emails.

Some are better than others and some are very complicated to setup and involve re-directing emails to servers that detect and remove malicious links and attachments before sending the cleaned mail back to the client.

The best available protection again Phishing is from Microsoft and is called “Advanced Threat Protection” or “ATP” and is available to anyone using the following Office 365 subscription plans:

All the above packages contain Microsoft Hosted Exchange mailboxes. If your Office version does NOT contain a hosted mailbox, it can be added by purchasing the Exchange Online Plan 1 or upgrading Office to at least Office 365 Business Premium.

To upgrade to Hosted Exchange or Business Premium and protect yourself by employing Microsoft Advance Protection, contact us for a quote.

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